Times of Change Britain on Film

To a devout minority, the Sabbath is a day of worship.

A day on which no unnecessary work should be done.

But even the great cathedrals don't always attract big congregations.

Though there are some churches which are nearly always full.

The village church still remains one of the centres of

Britain's country life.

Yet it is estimated that although half the population officially belong

to a church, only about 1 person in 10 goes regularly.

People disagree strongly about Sunday and how it should be spent.

The opposition is organised and influential.

The Lord's Day Observance Society believes firmly in the

traditional Sunday and much, though not all, church opinion is behind it.

To millions of people, perhaps the great majority,

Sunday is the day for getting out and about.

While most of the shops stay closed, the street markets in London do a

huge business and are part of the Sunday scene.

The national playgrounds are crowded,

there's hardly room to move on the river.

But a man can always moor up alongside

and relax away from the mainstream if he wants to.

That's the charm of Sunday - it can be spent to fit most moods.

We live in an age of stress and life in a

big town or city is no rest cure.

Today, 20th century blues, or what doctors call emotional illness,

affect all sorts of people at some time or another.

And it's partly due to the conditions in which we

live and work, to this kind of thing.

No wonder some people get jittery and nervous, excited or depressed.

No wonder heads ache and hearts thump and blood pressure goes up.

We live tightly jammed among a mass of restrictions which

in themselves can cause irritation.

This sixpenny sentinel for instance.

And in the closely packed suburbs is the eternal fight to

keep up with the Joneses.

Doctors have a name for it - they call it suburban neurosis.

Stress is part of the price we pay for progress as life gets

faster and noisier - some days you can almost scream.

But stress builds up inside and what really gets people down is

one unsolved problem on top of another.

Look at this chap. A businessman may complicate his ordinary

business worries by fears of the future - he may be too ambitious,

he may worry about the chaps who are after his job. All this builds

up tension which can affect people in factories just as much

in offices and which isn't left behind when he goes home.

Many business executives are victims of tension and

here, in a castle, is one of the clinics

which has been created to help them.

Patients come from all over the country, from some of the 2,000 firms

which have been invited to send their executives for rest and treatment.

Inside the castle are all the appliances of modern treatment -

for instance, the jet spray.

The electric light bath can wind a man down and tone him up.

This is a kind of bathing whose end product is health.

I wonder what those blokes at the office are doing now?

Well, there are worse ways of spending time.

And foam baths never did those film beauties any harm.

So much for the body, but what of the mind?

Some people take the easy way out, they take pills.

It's an incredible fact that in Britain today,

we swallow more than a million happiness pills every 24 hours.

We are spending on tranquilisers around £6 million a year.

These pills are meant to reduce tension without clouding the mind.

Some students use them to get through exams and motorists

have been known to take them to settle those driving test nerves.

But tranquilisers are open to misuse

and they don't remove the real causes of stress.

While industry is beginning to look after its workers,

nothing much seems to be done in the home

where stress can be just as acute.

Stress, say the doctors, often starts in childhood, but it's not

always the child on whose mind frustration leaves its impression.

To any mother, the daily round of shopping, taking the children

to school and looking after the family

can sometimes become a bit overwhelming.

Is it any wonder that some women find that they just can't cope?

And here's a mixture for making what has come to be known

throughout the world simply as The Pill.

Millions of words have been written for and against it.

For this little white tablet is more explosive than dynamite.

Sermons have been preached on it, men and women have argued over it.

It's the most controversial pill ever produced and today

it's being taken by nearly half a million women in Britain alone.

Scientifically, it's a dramatic step forward in the control of nature.

These marches on London from Aldermaston are concerned

with the biggest issue in the world today. Whatever the pros and cons

of banning the hydrogen bomb may be, theirs is a protest which has

brought together people from widely different spheres -

students and teachers, workers and bosses,

they may regard themselves as forerunners

of what is to come, the uniting of humanity itself. But in the

meantime, humanity itself is divided about the safest way to get there.

These voices will have to fill more of Britain

than Trafalgar Square to change a country's mind.

They're emphasising the right of people to protest, to make

themselves heard whether other people listen to them or not.

One of the exciting things about London is the astonishing mixture

of races - not a colour, a religion, a nationality is unrepresented.

This has been so for centuries

and the capital has never ceased to profit by it.

What with their Red Guards

and hydrogen bombs, the Chinese make a lot of noise in China.

But in England, they are usually the quietest immigrants of all.

In the '50s, there was scarcely a Chinese restaurant to be found

outside the big cities. There are 20 today for every one

a mere ten years ago and this spells

a revolution in British eating habits.

Half the fun of Chinese eating is having a go with

the chopsticks. But if you want to really eat the Chinese way, you

should make lots of noise, especially with the soup, it shows you like it.

Strange how manners can differ -

noisy eating, yet no Chinese gentleman

would dream of blowing his nose in public.

Our debt to China is not only for food,

their art has enriched Western culture for centuries.

Britain's Chinese, about 45,000 in number, many of very humble,

peasant origin, are remarkably law-abiding -

cause the authorities virtually no trouble.

Many are here without families, bent on saving enough to go back

to Hong Kong and start their own businesses.

Not all the Chinese in Britain are manual workers.

At the other end of the scale, a fine house in Hampstead,

property of ship-owner, P Y Shoo.

The Shoos have been in England 17 years now, completely integrated

with English life socially and in business. They yet preserve at

home the disciplined tranquillity - the way of life consciously

evolved over thousands of years that modern China has largely rejected.

The first Poles to come to Britain settled in Scotland in 1830.

This leather manufacturer was one of the 60,000 more who came with

the Free Polish Forces in 1940 after their country had been overrun.

Today, only about 4,500 Poles remain in Scotland.

Most of the community live in the south of England.

Britain's principle Polish club is the Polish Hearth,

in South Kensington, which was started in 1940 as a centre

for the Free Polish Forces.

More Poles have settled in the Ealing area of West London

than in any other part of Britain.

Many have changed their jobs to make a living.

Ealing grocer Stefan Rozwadowski was once a textile engineer,

now he sells Polish food to Polish housewives

and to some English ones, as well.

You'll find Poles in almost every walk of life in Britain today.

Mateusz Grabowski, for instance,

is a chemist with one of the most unusual chemist shops in the country.

At the back of it, he has a gallery in which he

displays the works of modern painters and sculptors

who might not otherwise have exhibitions.

Though most of Britain's Poles take a full part in everyday life,

many of them keep up their national customs.

Here, for instance, at the Polish Young People's Club in

South Kensington, Olga's dancing group perform traditional dances.

HE SINGS IN POLISH

Today, many young Poles would feel much more at home doing

the Twist. For although Britain's Poles will always be

proud of their heritage, they are more

interested in marching into tomorrow than in looking back to yesterday.

Over the last 10 years, West Indians have been flocking into Britain.

Today, there are some 350,000 of them living here,

nearly half of them in London.

Why do they come to this country?

To find jobs and better opportunities and because, as

British subjects, they look on Britain as their second home.

Their own homelands, ten beautiful islands in the sun which

for 300 years have been part of the British Commonwealth and Empire,

cannot provide work for them all in a rapidly increasing population.

These West Indians were among the last to

arrive at Southampton before immigration was controlled.

At Waterloo Station, many were met by relatives and friends,

but some had no-one to greet them.

Others had only addresses in Manchester, Birmingham or Leeds.

To get them on their way,

reception committees worked throughout the night.

As most of the West Indies live by agriculture, the majority

who've come to Britain are unskilled for industry,

so jobs present a major problem.

London Transport has a highly successful scheme which recruits

bus conductors from Barbados, one of the West Indian islands.

Candidates are chosen on the island and some 200 of them

come to Britain every year to join London's bus conductor force

of more than 14,000 men and women.

A day's outing and it's raining.

Britain's climate is something else that West Indians have

to get used to. This party is off to Clacton-on-Sea.

8,000 West Indians served in the British forces during the war

and about 1,000 a year came to Britain just after the war.

It was during the early '50s that immigration started in earnest,

when 20,000 a year were arriving here, practically all men.

But over the next five years, more and more women

and children arrived to create a family pattern.

They're essentially a simple, fun-loving people

and this sort of outing makes them forget their worries.

For a few hours, they can escape the bewilderment of trying to

adjust themselves to living in a world of different customs

and different outlooks.

Old prejudices die hard

and misunderstandings can become even more confusing.

Though if you're very young, your problems tend to be different.

25 years ago, not one father in 10,000 saw his baby born.

Today, more and more fathers like to be there, especially at home.

Accountant Fred Brown saw both his children's births.

Buckinghamshire was one of the first counties to run mothers' clubs,

held in the evenings when fathers can babysit.

One of the lectures is on the dangers to children

in the home, with special emphasis on inflammable garments...

..and non-inflammable materials.

Meanwhile, Father is finding some hazards too.

Here, at one of Britain's only chain of combined mother and baby shops,

she chooses an all-purpose suit that will stretch as the baby gets bigger.

29 of these shops have been opened in London in three years.

It's amazing what you can get for babies these days -

there's a bottle and teat that can be sterilised together,

an example of how designers are concentrating on producing

goods to make mothers' lives easier and save time.

Bedford and Coventry, Glasgow, Oxford, Cambridge

and Gloucester, Basildon and Bishop Stortford, London, Liverpool,

Birmingham are just a few of the places where new city

and shopping centres are changing the way of life for millions.

The Bull Ring has been a flourishing trade centre for over 1,000 years

and is now probably the most advanced of its kind in the world -

23 acres of it under one roof, built at a cost of £8 million.

Department stores, markets, supermarkets, a hundred shops,

escalators to transport 150,000 people an hour.

The problem of getting to and from the Bull Ring has been

superbly solved - ring motorways lead into car parks.

The architects have striven to retain something of

the character of the old Bull Ring.

This poultry and fish market, for instance, where independent traders

compete and competition there rarely seems to be - not many places will

sell you chicken at one and tuppence a pound.

All sorts of household goods are nowadays weighed not

just in pounds and ounces, but in kilos and grams, as well.

It makes it simpler to market them on the Continent.

In these ways, we are gradually getting used to new weights

and measures without realising it.

Some goods, such as wine, are sold on a

mixture of the two systems, the old and the new.

And in places like Soho,

many a shop will serve a kilo as casually

as it'll serve a couple of pounds.

The change is already starting,

although the beauty queens are still 36-22-36.

It may be many years yet before they are 90-55-90 in centimetres.

But luckily they'll still look the same.

But the big change will be when we finally decide to go over to

decimal coinage, for pounds shillings and pence, with some

units split into 12 and others split into 20, are a real headache for

foreigners - so they are to everyone who isn't quick at figuring.

A decimal coinage would do away with threepenny bits

and half-crowns. Instead, we'd have a main unit like a pound

and a cent - all so much simpler.

Rubbish, refuse, garbage,

litter, trash, junk and scrap.

Our instant way of living out of cans, bottles, bags and packets

merely helps to aggravate the debris generated by our throwaway society.

The waste we create in this routine living

averages 2lb a day for every person in Britain,

and every two or three hundredweight of it averages a cubic yard in size.

On the shelves of stores

and supermarkets throughout the country thousands of commodities

each have their own separate containers. Nearly everything we

eat or use is wrapped in something - either a can, a bottle, a bag or

a packet. Soon these containers are adding to the pile in the dustbin.

Shall we burn it? Grind it? Pulverise it?

Take it to sea and sink it?

Or pile it up somewhere else?

Refuse disposal is quite a problem

but to the resourceful ones it's also an opportunity.

Take wastepaper, for instance. At the end of a pen pusher's day,

there's an awful lot of paper in the basket. So after collection with

all the other rubbish, it's sorted and baled at the delivery centre.

So, collected, sorted, baled, transported, pulped,

cleansed, sterilised, rolled, pressed, printed and stitched.

Last week's letters, memos and wrappings have become next

week's brand-new cartons and containers.

In a world where costs keep rising, we just can't afford to waste.

But is there anybody who doesn't waste something?

The rag and bone merchant with his horse and cart, his grotesque heap of junk and his vociferous street cry

is a fading scene. When mass production can so easily replace

things, piecemeal collection and sale of junk offers little reward.

Of the wares he collects, assorted rags are perhaps the most negotiable.

After sorting, the cotton rags become industrial cleaning material,

carpet felt and roof felt.

For generations, families have roasted

themselves round the living room fire with most of the heat

going up the chimney, by the way, and then frozen upstairs.

Until recently, only two and a half million of the 17 million

homes in Britain had any form of central heating.

It's still a bit of a novelty, but it's catching on.

And now, 400,000 new installations are being put into homes each

year to give all the year round domestic hot water supplies

and a constant temperature in the rooms.

At long last the experts are being called in to provide a degree of

comfort which used to be considered a luxury, if not downright immoral.

Here, people can look at the various methods of central heating -

electricity, gas, solid fuel and oil -

and get advice on which best suits their own needs.

No less than £100 million is being spent annually on

heating appliances and having them installed.

Yet, unless the houses are efficiently insulated,

and most of them aren't, one third of all the heat produced

escapes through doors, windows, walls and roof.

The surprising thing is that there are

no official standards for insulating houses.

Insulated homes manage on much smaller radiators and heat can

be prevented from escaping through the cavity walls by filling them in.

Some people put the sun to work. Large quantities of solar radiation

still get through even on cloudy days in Britain.

The same idea is being used on this Cheshire housing estate,

where some of the houses are having solar panels fitted.

They'll produce 30 gallons of domestic hot water

a day by preheating it to 85 degrees Fahrenheit

and thus cut down on fuel bills.

This well-insulated school at Wallasey in Cheshire has no

central heating and for several years now,

it's had no heating bills either.

It's the first school in Britain to be heated by solar radiation.

With the cost of fuel still going up, you would think

the problem of wasting heat ought to be a matter of national importance -

we can't really afford to go on warming up the sky.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd